


Distraction

by lovetincture



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-17
Updated: 2019-01-17
Packaged: 2019-10-11 21:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17454347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovetincture/pseuds/lovetincture
Summary: Zelda doesn’t trust Mary Wardwell, not one bit.





	Distraction

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who follows me for Sherlock fic: don’t worry! There is more of that in the works. I have one fic half finished and another planned for [Season of Kink](https://seasonofkink.dreamwidth.org/). I was just captured by the dynamic between Zelda and Miss Wardwell and needed some lady loving in my literary life. :D

Zelda didn’t trust Mary Wardwell, not one bit. She didn’t trust the way the other witch was always lurking around Sabrina, always ready to be _helpful_. The wrong kind of help, if you asked her— the kind that led to exorcisms, of all things.

And if Zelda was honest with herself, she didn’t like the shine that Sabrina had taken to Miss Wardwell. She didn’t like that Sabrina was quick to go to her with a problem or the need for a spell, when those had always been Zelda’s purview. It didn’t escape Zelda’s notice that Miss Wardwell had been the one to convince Sabrina to complete her dark baptism, and while she should be rejoicing at the fact, one of the lost and declining Spellman clan brought back into the fold— she found herself _annoyed_.

Who was this witch, excommunicated from her coven, apparently, who held such sway over her niece?

After the incident with the hellfire, with Sabrina returning home white of hair and with a new, coltish confidence about her—after she’d given Sabrina a tube of black cherry lipstick as a baptismal gift, because of course Sabrina would want to embrace her inner darkness now— Zelda resolved to find out who Mary Wardwell really was.

* * *

She traveled to the cottage under cover of night. A scrying spell had made short work of revealing the witch’s location. She left once Hilda was asleep—early to bed, boring as always—and charmed the baby into a restful, deep slumber as well. She left while Sabrina was up with the Kinkle boy, being less sneaky than she thought.

  
Zelda shook her head. It had been a hard lesson to understand that she couldn’t protect her niece, not really. There were some things, like heartbreak at the hands of mortal boys, that neither love nor magic nor good sense could ward off.

No matter. For tonight, she was concealed under a cloak the color of night, pulled up to hide the new-penny shine of her hair. She whispered a spell under her breath, an incantation for invisibility.

Zelda peered in the window nearest the path, quiet as a mouse. Nothing. Heavy, black shades were drawn, and she couldn’t see a thing. She picked up her feet, walking carefully so as to avoid crunching the fallen leaves underfoot. She walked across the front, intending to check the windows on the far side of the house—

—and as she passed the threshold of the front door, it swung open. Miss Wardwell was standing there, hips cocked, long blood-colored fingernails drumming rhythmically against one hip.

One graceful eyebrow was raised in an expression that was one part amusement and one part challenge. “Well?” She drawled. “Are you going to skulk around outside all night, or are you coming in?”

Zelda cleared her throat and straightened, pushing her hood back down away from her face. She smoothed her hair and met Mary Wardwell’s eyes with an imperious gaze of her own. Two could play that game. Zelda would not be shamed or frightened off like a child.

“Yes, thank you.” She said coolly instead.

Miss Wardwell gave an approving smile with her blood red lips, with just the corners curled up. She stood aside to let Zelda enter, and enter she did, feeling as though she were walking into a lion’s den. The trouble was she didn’t know if she were a fellow lioness or the prey.

Inside, the interior was lit with candles that gave the place a soft-focus sort of romance. Zelda scoffed internally. Frivolous, really, and she said as much. “You do know electric lights suit just as well, and without the fire hazard.”

Miss Wardwell didn’t take the bait, and Zelda had to admit to herself that was what it was. She was feeling off-kilter and she wanted to get back onto solid ground, ground she understood. “Some of us prefer the old ways.”

Zelda’s eyes flicked over everything in the cabin. Her gaze lighted on a half-drained glass of red wine, just as Miss Wardwell turned to retrieve another. Zelda’s eyes followed her as she went, lingering on the swell of her figure beneath her form-fitting black dress as she turned.

It was ungodly warm in this cabin. Damned candles.

Miss Wardwell poured a second glass and held it out to Zelda, who tried to demur. “Oh, no thank you, Miss Wardwell,” she said. “I don’t drink.”

There was the quirk of that dramatic black eyebrow again, that told Zelda she had been caught out in a lie, and she felt her cheeks flush.

“I insist,” Miss Wardwell practically purred, pressing the glass into her hand. Her tone was polite, but there was thread of steel running beneath it; Zelda had no doubt that she really _was_ insisting. “And please, call me Mary.”

She took the glass with a tight smile and took a sip, keeping her eyes trained on Mary the whole time. Mary smiled again and turned to put something on the record player. A record player, honestly. The theatrics of it were absurd. Zelda just barely avoided rolling her eyes. She was raised better than that.

“So,” Mary said, settling into a plush, decadent-looking seat with the grace of a predator and gesturing for Zelda to do the same, “To what do I owe the honor?”

Zelda perched on her own chair opposite, keeping her back straight and rigid as she set her drink down on an expensive-looking side table made of darkest wood. “I was curious,” she said. She took out a cigarette and clipped it into her holder, nearly setting conjured flame to its tip before asking, as though in afterthought, “Do you mind?”

Mary looked amused at her powerplay. _Obvious, Zelda_. But she shrugged in the universal gesture for _go ahead_.

Zelda lit up her cigarette and took a long, bracing drag, letting her eyes slide shut and the world fall away. It really was too warm in here. That wine really was very good.

She opened her eyes to find Mary watching her intently. Again.

She sat up straighter, suddenly very conscious of her body in the room, the space she took up. She wished Mary would stop looking at her. She hoped that she wouldn’t.

“So what brings you to my door?” Mary asked at last.

Ah. Of course, the obvious. It wouldn’t do to be annoyed at the question. It was a fair one and if anything, stranger that she hadn’t been asked it until now.

“I was curious.”

“About?”

“You.”

Mary paused to run her fingers along the rim of her wine glass. Zelda had a brief moment of satisfaction, of thinking she had succeeding in knocking the unflappable Miss Wardwell off her game, before the other witch looked up wearing a wide and wicked smile. “Right answer.”

Mary leaned back in her chair as though to stretch, moving her body in a way that showed off every curve beneath the inky velvet of her dress. Zelda wondered if it felt as soft as it looked. Her fingers even went so far as to twitch in sympathy before she forced them to stillness. _Shake it off, Spellman._

“You didn’t know Edward.” Zelda challenged.

Mary shrugged a single shoulder in an indolent gesture. She let her head loll against the backrest of the plush red sofa, bored. “You don’t know that.”

“I’m sure I would recognize you.” Zelda pressed. “I have an excellent eye for faces.”

“Oh, come now. You can do better than that.” She sat up again and fixed Zelda with that piercing stare. Her blue eyes looked almost black in the low light. “Edward had a life outside of you, as you well know. You wouldn’t know every person he’d ever met, every person he’d collaborated with.” She smiled, and there was nothing kind or joyful in it. The smile was mockery made flesh, but her voice got impossibly softer, dark and honey-sweet, wrapping around Zelda until she might think she’d been bespelled had she not been paying such rapt attention to the woman in front of her. “You disapproved of Edward, disapproved of his marriage. He wouldn’t have told you about me. You had so little to do with one another’s lives there at the end. You know this.”

Zelda stared her down, nostrils flaring. She didn’t know what possessed her but she drained her glass in one pristine, long swallow and set it down deliberately on the lacquered dark wood of the coffee table. She skirted the low table feeling predatory herself, and she stopped just short of Miss Wardwell. She stared down her long nose, giving the smug witch a look that would curdle milk, that had struck fear into the heart of witch and mortal alike during her long years on this earth.

“You’re not who you say you are,” she accused.

“Very nice,” Mary breathed. She reached out one red-taloned hand to set it against the gentle curve of Zelda’s belly. It was nothing, a light touch, but it rocked through her like fire. “You see, that’s your intuition, your gut. That’s what makes you a powerful witch and what the Father Blackwoods of the world will never understand.”

She didn’t move her hand, and Zelda stood there trying to catch her breath, embarrassed by the sudden heat curling within her. The heat that, if she was perfectly honest with herself, wasn’t sudden at all but had been steadily rising since she set foot in this cottage.

“Why are you helping Sabrina?” she pressed, and she had the presence of mind to feel shamed by the breathiness in her own voice. The way she sounded lost and the way her skin tingled and ached for touch.

Mary’s tongue darted out to wet her lip. “Do you want me to answer that?” she asked, and there was laughter lurking in her voice. “Or do you want something else?” She pulled her hand back and let it curl in her lap, innocent as a sleeping snake.

Zelda’s tightly wound control snapped like a thread. She surged forward and captured Mary’s mouth with her own, drawing a pleased hum from the other witch. Far from being taken by surprise, Mary leaned into the kiss, coming alive under Zelda’s hands and flowing over her sinuous and lovely. Her hands came up to frame Zelda’s face, and Zelda gave into the impulse to tangle her fingers in that rich, tangled mass of hair. The strands were slippery and coarse beneath her fingers, and she tugged, earning a muffled groan for it. The kiss tasted of wine, of the waxy base of Mary’s blood red lipstick.

She pulled back gasping, wrenching herself away from the grasping, biting heat of it. Mary looked as composed as ever, save for the smudge of red marring her perfectly white skin. Her eyes were too bright and her breath came fast and shallow, and Zelda took a certain animal pleasure in having been the cause. She dragged a fingertip across the streaked lipstick just to make it worse. Mary’s tongue darted out to flick against her finger before she closed her lips around it and gave a light suck. Zelda’s eyes slid shut of their own volition, and she moaned.

She opened her eyes to Mary shoving her down against the sofa until she was flat-backed and staring up at the ceiling. Mary straddled her, a wicked gleam in her eye, before bending to suck bruising kisses into her neck. That dark fall of hair draped over her face in a curtain that smelled of musk and brimstone, and Zelda gasped and bucked under her. She reached up to catch Mary in an embrace and found her hands summarily pinned.

“You’re not a high school teacher,” Zelda panted.

Mary pulled back to quirk an eyebrow at her, keeping her wrists pinned and digging her fingernails into the fine flesh there. “And you’re not a mild-mannered aunt.” She bent to whisper in Zelda’s ear, pausing to trace the shell of it with her tongue. “We can be more than one thing, darling.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can check out my [original writing here](https://hopezane.com) if you're interested.
> 
> [Twitter](http://twitter.com/lovetincture) | [Tumblr](http://lovetincture.tumblr.com) | [Dreamwidth](http://lovetincture.dreamwidth.org)


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